Do we need support for low-level development (ASM, microcontrollers)?

[Evgeniy Ivanov]

Hello Julian and list,

On Mon March 2 2009 19:46:23 Julian Bäume wrote:
> Hey Evgeniy,
>
> On Monday 02 March 2009 12:27:39 Evgeniy Ivanov wrote:
> > Now I returned to university (a kind of return...) so started Computer
> > Architecture course and have to write some ASM code for intel 8051. The
> > problem I faced (in linux...) is that it's a MCU so emulation is required
> > (and surely special debugger) and I didn't find any good UI (SDCC has all
> > things except UI). In windows I used keil.
>
> I experienced the same situation some years ago...

Unfortunately we are not alone...

>
> > I think about writing project application to SoC, but still not sure I
> > will (even if no, there will be a chance I will get some free time in
> > summer). But anywhere do you think it (MCU support) can become a project
> > for KD?
>
> I'd really love to see MCU support comming ;) Let me explain something more
> here:
> I work on a KDE4 port of KTechLab, that is supposed to be an IDE for
> electronic circuits and MCU. 

Very nice application. And UI looks very similar to KDevelop: 
http://ktechlab.org/wiki/index.php?title=Index:Screenshots
Hope to try it this weekend. If to be sincere don't remember much about 
circuits, but I'm interested in this area.

> The last couple of weeks I reimplemented (and
> also copied a lot) a KDevelop shell to fit in for KTechLab developing. This
> still needs some polishing, but I'm getting closer to what it should be
> like. After finishing the port to a kdevplatform infrastructure, I thought
> about implementing the language support we need for KTechLab. No work is
> done in this area for now, except some ideas, that we need stuff like this.
> So I'd really love to see something like this in KDevelop ;D There already
> is some kind of support for PIC MCUs written in C, ASM and "microbe", a
> basic like language but I love to see them as KDevelop/KTechLab extensions
> later.

Looks like you did a lot of good work :)
Why don't you just contribute to KDevelop's shell, and not fork it?

> > As I understand we have some libraries used to implement C++ debugging,
> > and thing I talk about requires switching from gdb --> sdcdb plus some
> > minor UI to show MCU's registers).
>
> That's exactly what I thought. There is avr-gdb (AVR MCUs), gpsim  (PIC
> MCUs) has possibilities to connect to gdb and the languages are quite
> common (ASM and C). With tools like that, it should be possible to
> implement simulation for MCUs into KTechLab based on gdb output. I haven't
> looked very deep into all this, but I keep these things in mind for later
> development.
>

Cool. Thank you very much for the info. 


-- 
Best regards, Evgeniy.
Key Fingerprint: F316B5A1F6D2054FCD18B74A95400ABB1FE567A3

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